Two-Pizza Team Rule

Jeff Bezos's organizational heuristic that team size should be limited to roughly six to eight people—the number two pizzas can feed. The reasoning is grounded in communication dynamics: small teams communicate more effectively, decide faster, and produce more coherent output because communication overhead scales with the square of team size (a six-person team has fifteen channels, a twelve-person team has sixty-six) while productive capacity scales linearly. Conway's Law explains why this works: reducing team size reduces communication channels, which reduces the interfaces and potential misalignments that organizational communication introduces. Each small team produces a coherent component because internal communication is simple and effective. But the rule trades coherence within teams for fragmentation between teams—interfaces between components reflect inter-team communication, which is necessarily more formal and constrained.